Health and Fitness

2nd Congressional District Candidates Appear in Forum on Lack of South Side Trauma Care


 

CHICAGO–(ENEWSPF)–February 5, 2013.

WHAT:     2nd Congressional district candidates forum on south side trauma care
WHEN:   Tuesday February 5th, 6pm
WHERE: University of Chicago Kent Hall 1020 E 58th st
WHO:      Sponsored by Students for Health Equity and Fearless Leading by the Youth, all 2nd District Congressional campaigns invited, Beale is confirmed
 
Candidates for Illinois’s second congressional will square off Tuesday at 6pm the University of Chicago (Kent Hall 1020 East 58th Street) on a major issue affecting the 2nd Congressional District – the absence of any adult trauma care in the district, which encompasses some of the areas hardest hit by violence and has been shown in several studies to have Chicago’s longest ambulance run times as a result.
The issue of the lack of south side trauma care has re-surfaced recently when University of Chicago police attacked a sit-in at their new $700 million research building led by neighborhood youth from Fearless Leading by the Youth (FLY), whose co-founder Damian Turner was shot in 2009 four blocks from the U of C hospital but died 10 miles away at Northwestern Hospital due to the lack of a south side trauma center. Ever since FLY youth, now joined by U of C student group Students for Health Equity, have been fighting to get the U of C Medical Center, the richest and most subsidized hospital in Chicago, to open an adult level 1 trauma center to care for victims of life-threatening injuries. Recently they have been asking the University of Chicago to start by expanding its children’s trauma center’s age limit from 15 to 21 to begin to address the vast and growing need for trauma care on the southeast side.

The second Congressional District includes the areas farthest from trauma care in the city and south suburbs as well as some of the neighborhoods hardest hit by gun violence, the type of trauma where longer transport times have the biggest effect on mortality.

“Its unfair for this community not to have a trauma center, for all the incidents going on… Its heartless,” says Sheila Rush, mother of Damian Turner. Ms. Rush was amongst the protesters pushed to the ground by University of Chicago Police last Sunday for trying to get a meeting with the hospital leadership, a meeting she and the youth of FLY have been asking for since the death of her son three years ago to no avail.

 

 


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